Having a Plan

In my last post, I wrote about being content with my station in life.  I didn’t win the Mega Millions jackpot; my job situation hasn’t changed; and, at the moment, I certainly am not pulling in the readers the way other bloggers have done.  Contentment is more of an exercise for me than a character trait. I ask myself: what do those other bloggers have that I don’t? (Well, other than popularity.)  The first answer that comes to me is that all of them have, or had (for those who reached FIRE*), a plan.

Plan for what?

Having a plan makes sense.  Virtually everyone, from blogs to financial magazines, will tell anyone who will listen that before one starts on the road to financial independence, one needs a plan.  Heck, anyone with any sort of undertaking at all needs to have a plan to be successful. Even the Bible talks about planning:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,  saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.'”

(That was Jesus talking, so I’ll defer to his knowledge on that point.)

The FIRE movement has been around for a while, so lots of people have weighed in on how to reach that pinnacle.  A lot of those people’s plans are similar.  Forbes, for example, hits some of the usual high points in a rare discussion of financial independence: be frugal, save a lot, invest a lot, and develop multiple sources of income.  Many other blogs, such as this one, include a plan with similar ideas:  rapid accumulation, followed by investing a lot.

Sometimes shorter is better

My plans at this stage of life aren’t quite so long-reaching.  (A lot of this has to do with my recognition that I am nowhere near FIRE as of this writing.) For me, what needs to happen is much more short-term. I have determined that without organizing what I want to do each night after work on side hustles, blogs, and things of that nature, nothing gets done.  (Sometimes, nothing gets done even if I do have some amount of organization.)

To-do lists work for day jobs, too. Rather typically for me, this list was mostly unfinished (and largely untouched) at the end of the work day.

I’m not alone in this approach, of course.  Lots of bloggers like to plan to publish one post per week (or more, for those who have lots of time to write…which I don’t).  Since I have two separate and completely unrelated blogs, that would involve two nights per week or more. The hope there is that I would eventually get ahead, so that I could schedule my posts, as some of the more successful page owners do.  After that, I could use one or more nights per week to work on some of my side hustles, in the hopes that I could get in on this “rapid accumulation” thing.

The shortfalls of a plan

Being a married dad, of course, I do run into the usual unpredictability of life with a wife and kids.  I know there will be nights during which the things I wanted to do for my blogs or my hustles just don’t happen…and that’s okay.  I’m not going to get so wrapped up in these things that I forget to have a life with my family.  So, obviously, there are going to be some overarching long-term plans relating to how to deal with the unexpected.  At the moment, they seem to involve doing most of my writing in the 11pm hour.**

In any case, the idea here is that I create more and better plans for myself and use those plans to move forward in whatever ventures I undertake.  Whether any of this will be a stepping stone toward the proverbial brass ring for me is anyone’s guess at the moment.  Stay tuned.

How about you?  Do you have a to-do list?  A longer-term plan? And how do you deal with it when life happens?

* Financial Independence/Retire Early. Neither concept is close to being within my grasp as I write this presently.
** Hopefully using this particular hour for all my blogging stuff is a short-term plan.